In 1513, Giovanni di Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (1475-1521) son of the mythic Lorenzo il Magnifico was elected Pope Leo X. Giovanni had inherited his family’s refined interest in, and zealous support of, the arts: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. But of all of these, Giovanni favored music, for which his passion was legendary among contemporaries. The musical life of Leo’s court was unimaginably rich and vibrant, as innumerable eyewitness accounts confirm.

LA MORRA joined forces with Professor Anthony M. Cummings, author of the book The Lion’s Ear: Pope Leo X, the Renaissance Papacy, and Music, to bring this world acoustically to life and illustrate the range of practices typifying Leo’s own musical experiences. The project has been honoured with the Noah Greenberg Award (2014) by the American Musicological Society. It is a tribute to a rare and extraordinary patron of music himself a composer and musician, who occupied that singular position at the very summit of the universal ecclesiastical hierarchy.